Re: RFC: Disabling registration or automatic account deletion?

Perhaps we should add a subtitle explaining it's a programming forum andthat Linux is also covered...

I found the admin page for adding such a thing, and took a crack at it, but feel free to change it if you can come up with anything better...

I was also tempted to enable the "rules" feature there which makes new users agree to a set of arbitrary rules we specify before they can register... And, have them say something like, "I agree that if I post any spam in the forums, I will pay each admin of the forums the sum of $10,000USD for each spam post to compensate them for time wasted cleaning up my mess."... ;-) But, I was afraid that might scare off legit folks who are unclear on exactly what constitutes "spam"...

Re: RFC: Disabling registration or automatic account deletion?

Looks good to me.

Better not to do that agreeing to pay money thing, however tempting...On the other hand, if we don't get new users anyway you can as welltry it. ;-) But increase it to 100K or something, 10K isn't quite worththe trouble because you need to hunt them down and drag them into court and everything.

Re: RFC: Disabling registration or automatic account deletion?

Re: RFC: Disabling registration or automatic account deletion?

Hey gang! I just noticed that I'd let that email fall through the cracks and i3839 has the FTP info now. Sorry to be so absent all the time. I agree with the earlier comment that Stack Overflow is probably a much more useful place to get answers to these questions now.

Re: RFC: Disabling registration or automatic account deletion?

There must be some sort of exploitable bug that the bots know about, because I've noticed a couple new topics posted by guests even though that's still disabled... And, when I go to delete them, I get some error about "unable to find topic" or something, but it seems like the posts/topics end up getting deleted anyway... It's like it doesn't realize at delete time that it's the first post in the thread, so it doesn't know it's deleting the whole topic... It's presumably related to how they're getting around the rules about not being able to post new topics, by somehow disguising their posts as just another post in an existing topic...

Re: RFC: Disabling registration or automatic account deletion?

Yeah, a while back (discussed earlier in this thread) I had to disable guests posting new threads, because the spam was just getting overwhelming... It's bad enough when they just post new comments in old threads, but when they can post new threads solely dedicated to spam, it tends to get out of hand... But, there must be some vulnerability somewhere, because they were still occassionally managing to post new threads anyway, even with it disabled... So, yeah, it probably doesn't matter if it's re-enabled again, since they're apparently going to do it anyway... ;-/

One thing I decided while on vacation is that I'm really sick of my old laptop! It's heavy as a sack of bricks, it's outrageously slow to boot, and it's got some weird problem where half the time it simply freezes up on boot and won't proceed... So, now that I'm back home, I just ordered a new Chromebook... I never thought I'd want one for myself, because it's so limited and solely web-focused, but the idea has grown on me, and I think it'll be fairly ideal for my needs while on vacation... Plus, it's a hell of a lot cheaper than buying a new full-blown decent laptop that I could install a full Linux distro on! The only thing I'm unsure of is if it comes with a decent SSH client (and terminal emulator) or not... I think one can be found via Google's app store, if not... That's really my only major need, aside from a browser...

Re: RFC: Disabling registration or automatic account deletion?

I ordered the 13.3" ASUS with 4G of RAM and 16G local FLASH storage... I figured local storage wasn't much of a big requirement with such a thing, given everything is in "the cloud" (how I hate that buzzword!)... I had $100 Amazon gift card from Xmas plus close to $50 in credit card reward points, so the thing only ended up costing me about $100 in real money! It's supposed to arrive sometime today, so I'll have to review it sometime later after playing with it a bit...

Re: RFC: Disabling registration or automatic account deletion?

It seems pretty cool... I wouldn't want to use it as my everyday computer, certainly... But, then, the same could be said of ANY laptop/notebook! But, the Chromebook in particular has a strange keyboard layout which I wouldn't want to use for coding or anything too serious... It's lacking Home, End, PageUp/Down, Insert, Delete, and all F-keys... I regularly like to use PageUp/Down to quickly scroll through web pages and such, and Home/End to jump to the top/bottom... And, I'm often doing Shift+Insert to paste... And, the software I work with makes heavy use of F-keys... There are apparently ways to emulate such keys via various Ctrl/Alt keypress combos, which I could probably get used to if I had to, but still it's not an ideal keyboard layout for work use, anyway... But, for what I got it for (browsing and SSH'ing into home and work E-mail servers while on vacation), it should be fine... It seems kind of weird to have an SSH session inside a web browser (the terminal emulator and SSH client are basically just a Chrome extension), but it seems to work fine, anyway... I was going to check out "developer mode", but reading up it sounds like that will wipe out all current configuration, and require me to set everything up yet again, and I don't really feel like going through the hassle right now...

(It's also missing a Caps Lock key, but I think that's the one brilliant feature of its keyboard... I wish all keyboards did away with that hideous abomination! Oh, and the totally worthless Scroll Lock too! But, at least that's not located in a position where I'm always mistakenly hitting it while reaching for Tab...)